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I’m okay with “life of the author + some modest amount”, maybe with a minimum term to protect the families of authors who die young. For corporate works, somewhere between 28 and 56 seems reasonable. I think the typical person should be able to see the art of their youth enter the public domain in their lifetime.
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His name may be attached to that bill, but that was mostly Disney.
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This.
If something is copyright when you’re born, and still under copyright after you’re dead, how is that “limited time”?
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I would prefer life plus 20-25. That’s enough that the effect on any project started during the lifetime or even shortly after would be minimal and it would support immediate family but not for generations.
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Firing flashbangsmoke caps from a safe distance is one thing, hitting the star of the show in the face with a piece of metal is something else. Especially when the FX budget is already severely strained by the flashbangsmoke caps.
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Ah, the Nude Pooh argument.
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PREVIOUSLY ON BOING BOING
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I have to wonder if some bias was at work in that research, only because I find it odd that, if 14 years is optimal, the English just happened to hit on the optimal number way back in 1710?
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In comics, there’s also something about having to continually publish stories about that character with their name on the cover every once in a while, or the company loses the rights to the character. I think that’s how Marvel got to own the name Captain Marvel; DC waited too long without a CM book (after DC bought the rights to Captain Marvel/Shazam from Faucett Publications), and Marvel snagged it with their new Kree character. I think there is or was a similar situation with Wonder Woman, where she must appear regularly or the rights revert to her creator’s estate, but they might have come to a settlement over that. Human Torch, Sandman, Angel, Vision, and many others are new characters based on old ones to keep the copyright going.
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… one might imagine the original laws were based on lobbying by printing industry people, who knew exactly how long a new book would continue to sell before people lost interest 
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The printing lobby originally proposed no time limit on copyright. It was the lawmakers who added that.
ETA: I’m referring to the Statute of Anne from 1710, just FYI.
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… AIUI that’s trademark law, which is a whole different thing from copyright 
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I don’t know. Maybe the insistence that, someday, Mickey Mouse must enter the public domain is less important than the other 99% that withers so we can protect the mouse. Clearly setting the entire IP protocol based on Disney has been a mistake.
What if there was a “continual use” sort of argument? That and a rights reversion period for artists to reacquire their own IP.
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Ah, yes good point.
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I don’t think it is surprising and I don’t think the reasons have changed much in that time. 14 years is long enough that the vast, vast majority of works either achieve commercial success or fade into obscurity. It’s quite long compared to the production time of almost all works. 20 years is a time scale where typical internet rates result in a doubling: equivalently the present value of future earnings 20 years from now are diminished by a large fraction. All of this means that creators (and their investors) are basically never counting on revenue from much more than a decade or two in the future when deciding what to create.
Thus if your goal is to use financial incentives to maximize both the amount of creative works produced and their contribution to the public domain (and therefore as a basis for future creativity) you want to limit copyright to something around that. 14 is a traditional number but basically I would have a hard time believing the optimum would be less than 10 or more than 30 years.
Of course some people have other motivations. Some people think that creators should have an intrinsic right to control how their works are used that isn’t based on financially encouraging creative arts. I wholeheartedly disagree with that, but if you do, then obviously “life of the author” makes more sense.
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So when Batman comes into the public domain, he’s got to be wearing those silly purple gloves? And a few decades later he can ONLY be campy Adam West-style Batman?
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Agreed.
The origins of both copyright and patent law was to allow creators and inventors to share and benefit from their works. Those systems have been perverted to minimally benefit the creators and primarily benefit multinational conglomerates.
I would add that there should only be one extension beyond the death of the creator or their sale of the rights to another party. If the original creator still holds the rights but licenses it to a third party, then the copyright can be extended during their lifetime.
We are in a time when technology allows creators to share their work with an audience with very little cost or inertia, the balance needs to shift back in favor of them instead of distrubution companies that are no longer necessary to produce creative works.
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